Bathroom Monologue: Ratings 2: Rate Harder

Die Hard 2 References- 2
Old Spice High Endurance – 7
Jonathan Swift – 9.5
My hypocrisy – 10
Your hypocrisy – 0.5
Standard Tissues for blowing your nose - 5
Aloe-Treated Tissues for blowing your nose - 8
Vicks-Scented Tissues for blowing your nose – 8.5
Vicks-Scented Tissues for dabbing your eyes – 0
Tearing a standard tissue in half so that you can use it twice - 2.5
The three readers who realized that was a math joke, dividing the score of the standard tissue by two – 9
The one reader who figured Jonathan Swift was the mathematical equivalent of one's own hypocrisy minus someone else's hypocrisy - 9.5
Anyone who doesn't base their opinions of complicated topics on arbitrary and illogical numerical scales- 0
Kosovo – 6

Bathroom Monologue: Double and Nothing

There’s an old question of whether you’d like a hundred thousand dollars a month for every month of your life, or if you’d take one dollar for the first month, and have the sum doubled every passing month. The knee-jerk answer is to take the hundred thousand. It’s a lot more than one dollar, or two dollars, or four. On the doubled-dollar option, you’d only receive $2,048 in December (if you began in January).

But a mathematician will tell you that the doubling monthly sum will quickly surpass the hundred thousand. By the end of the second year, your check will be for over eight million dollars. The figure will keep doubling, and the hundred thousand will never catch up. This is what grandfathers have grinned over for generations, while feeding the brainteaser to their know-it-all grandchildren.

But that unlimited wealth proposes an unintended problem. In under four years the recipient will be pulling down over a quadrillion dollars a month. That much money barely exists in the currency of a single nation, meaning they would have to take all the money from everyone else in the country and print more just to hand him his check. This would leave everyone else in poverty, and probably get him killed. If the treasury just printed up the extra few quadrillions for that month, it would so grossly inflate the dollar that the currency would become valueless, again driving everyone else into poverty, and quite probably get our rich man killed.

Because of this terminal flaw in the doubling sum, the meager hundred thousand dollars a month remains the correct answer. It’s good news for the economy, and for all those grandchildren that felt so stupid for not having reached multiplication tables in school.

Bathroom Monologue: Lying Eyes

“The best lie is not the little white lie. White stains too easily. Similarly, do not trust a big, black lie. It is too ostentatious. The only one you can trust is the truth-colored lie. Make the lie look like the truth by making it close to the truth. Ground it in the things they already know. Confess a little to save the lot. You tore up some of the backyard rather than all of it. You ate three cookies rather than seven (or “some cookies;” “some” is enormously useful to a lie). The point is to make a lie-fiction close enough to the truth-reality that people will recognize the content of the lie when they view the truth. Thus when you say you went to return DVD’s to your wife’s sister at her motel, surveillance tapes showing your arrival will only corroborate your story. Meanwhile the truth-colored lie will shelter you actually did in there.”

Bathroom Monologue: The Bough Breaks

[GARY and SAMID sit on opposite sides of the booth, each in banana yellow tuxedos, both reading menus; AJA the GIANT FLOATING EYEBALL levitates beside SAMID, wearing a central retinal artery knotted like a bowtie, reading the menu over his shoulder; ARYANA in platemail, sitting on the windowseat beside GARY, trying to make out the chalkboard house specials; and GRUFF STOVER, inexplicably shrunken to six inches in height, with a miniature rifle and plastic cocktail sword across his lap, sitting on ARYANA’S armored shoulder. All are silent for a minute.]
Samid: If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there, does it make a noise?
Aryana: Yes, because your hypothetical only exists in our minds, and in my mind it made a noise.
Aja: If not, why did the birds fly away?
Stover: It invariably causes a massive disturbance that results in the vibrations that we identify as noise. It’s a technicality to say it’s not noise.
Gary: Pretty much like calling a piano not a piano just because you don’ see it falling out a third storey window.
[All look out the window. A beat passes. They resume reading the menus.]

Bathroom Monologue: Hotbed

Dillon’s mother often yelled at him to close the front door because they weren’t paying to heat the whole world. Because Dillon was dropped on his head too often as a baby, this made him wonder how hot he’d have to make in their house to heat all the other homes in the world. He didn’t think setting the thermostat at 95 and leaving the windows open would cut it. One time he went to a bonfire, and felt the heat on his face from the other side of the beach. That suggested that setting their home on fire might warm up the neighborhood, though it probably wouldn’t do much for the neighboring counties. In History class he saw videos of the atomic bomb. It had quite a blast radius, and was supposed to be incredibly hot – yet even that only lit up part of Japan. Mainland China didn’t get so much as an unseasonably warm breeze out of the deal. It would take a long chain of atomic blasts to kickstart global warming, and Dillon didn’t think he could get that out of their boiler. They had electric heat, you see. But maybe if he left the oven open while he did it…

Bathroom Monologue: Banning Headscarves; Banning All Scarves

The secretary walked quickly along the line, yanking shirts, skirts and trousers off those who resisted. Most of the people stayed still, keeping their place in line. Most were already undressing themselves. It was an indignity, but they worked in a national office, and this was better than getting fired.

He ordered, “Everything off. Even the thongs.”

“Can't we just take off the headscraves?” one woman asked, though she seemed hesitant to part even with that.

“No. That's offensive, but so too could a crucifix or a scullcap,” he said, yanking a yarmulke off a Hebrew. No one moved to stop him. “All clothing can potentially offend somebody, so the government's banned every scrap of it. No slutty micros, no nun's habits.”

At the back of a line a naked man shuddered, clutching his catheter bag. The secretary glared at him.

The old man asked, “This too?”

The secretary nodded sternly. “Might offend somebody.”

Bathroom Monologue: “It was a dark and stormy night.” –Edward Bulwer-Lytton

This is actually a eulogy for a bathroom monologue. I went on quite a rant about this famous phrase, then threw it into blackle.com to find out who begat the cliche. The offender was Edward Bulwer-Lytton, but it turns out I wasn’t the first to rip into his writing. It turns out I may be the last, as everyone else on earth has already made fun of him. Madeleine L'Engle, Ray Bradbury, Star Trek: The Next Generation... really, the second Star Trek series made fun of him? Now I can’t bring it to heart to slam old Edward. That’s just not right. You can only disagree with something so much before you become more annoying than the center of your ire. The guy overwrote. So did Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin. Yes, it being a dark night is redundant writing, and this phrase associated with a sort of self-indulgent drama that begs to be made fun of, but the suppression of women’s rights in the Middle East hasn’t been made fun of nearly enough. Debated? Fought? Yes, but not made fun of the may Mr. Bulwer-Lytton’s silly opening sentence was, and not nearly as often (there are even contests to parody his writing style - look it up). So now let’s venture over to some fresh territory of mockery. Let’s not execute Osama Bin Laden when we catch him; let’s give him a top-notch sex change, put him in a string bikini and parachute him into downtown Baghdad. That’ll be a bright and sunny day.

Bathroom Monologue: Death is…

-Never having to hit the snooze bar again.
-Reality falling asleep.
-The last note in your file.
-The end.
-The end of life functions.
-The end of brain functions.
-The end of some brain functions, some life functions, and the patience of those who are paying the hospital bill.
-The end of pretenses.
-The beginning.
-The purpose of the beginning.
-The thing that you will spend the most time anticipating, and yet the thing you can only be lucky to be ready for.
-Really, the least stressful thing you’ll ever do.
-Not to be taken lightly.
-When the doctors really don’t earn their fee.
-Going to a better place, either in that you have earned a paradise, or you’ve been so unbearable that wherever you’ve gone everyone else is just happy you’ve departed for it.
-Overly romanticized.
-Often anthropomorphized as a sentient skeleton in a robe, carrying an oar, riding in a boat.
-Often anthropomorphized as a sentient skeleton in a robe, carrying a sickle, hanging out in the fields for some reason.
-Often anthropomorphized as a really old man.
-Often anthropomorphized as a charioteer.
-Often anthropomorphized as a henchman.
-Often anthropomorphized as a deity.
-Often anthropomorphized as a place.
-Unconcerned with my misuse of the word “anthropomorphized.”
-Waiting for me.
-In need of spare change for some reason.
-A one-syllable word for something that has filled up libraries.
-Constantly occurring somewhere to someone or something, not merely every second, but every millisecond, and likely every nanosecond if you count all the single-celled critters that have been busily living and dying in your guts your entire life, witless that you’re even there.
-In possession of a much better and crueler sense of humor than Life, thanks to Her use of just one punchline.
-A really good cause for the use of a period.
-“Life’s conclusion to its search for the meaning of life - in this case.”

Bathroom Monologue: Love is…

-How the patriot feels for his country, how the zealot feels for his religion, how the sky feels for the ocean.
-Believing this is the last black eye.
-Legally blind; it can make out shapes, but shouldn’t drive.
-A chemical reaction.
-The best biological interface with this world.
-Peace with a part of the external world when you haven’t even achieved internal peace yet. Progress, it seems, is possible. Thank God.
-“Miracle. A miracle. That’s so obvious it doesn’t need to go on the list.”
-A faulty mating mechanism.
-When you don’t have to ask if she’ll come to know she’ll be there. Keep this in check. It could become trouble. Love has many crossovers with “stalking” and “just being annoying.”
-The most worthwhile thing that will ever hurt you.
-The only brand of submission that comes in the “victory” flavor.
-Accessorized self-help.
-Never having to say you’re sorry but always wanting to because you care that so much you pay attention to things you previously didn’t know existed. No question, it expands the consciousness.
-“Life’s search for the meaning of life. What a great idea.”

Bathroom Monologue: “Philosophy is…” –Flyer for an open admission community college course

-The intellectualization of all potentially meaningful and meaningless things.
-Rationalization of the human experience.
-A few atoms in the brain colliding in a slightly different way than usual. Nothing more.
-The course you were so psyched to sign up for.
-The course with the most expensive books.
-The course that turned “Why?” from a word you used to annoy your parents and into a word that destroyed everything you held dear.
-The course where you first gave up on the subject material and relied on saying things that might sound smart in the hopes of getting laid.
-The only course you were ever happy to receive a C- in, because thank God it was over.
-A logical and reasonable artifice constructed to hide base desires.
-Selfish.
-Do-It-Yourself religion.
-The laziest form of politics, with all of the beliefs and none of the practicality, all of the conviction and none of the action. It’s the diet of ideology, where rather than changing the world for the better, you merely tell the world what would be better while you do your own thing. Like diets, their greatest hits are made up of fads and failures.
-“Life’s search for the meaning of life. What a great idea.”

Bathroom Monologue: Historical Friction

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, famous author of the Sherlock Holmes series where a detective used keen deduction to find physically plausible answers to seemingly impossible or supernatural crimes, believed Harry Houdini was a nefarious magician who used his immense spiritual powers to block those of others when testing them in order to "debunk" their mysticism and ruin their careers. This is untrue. Mr. Houdini was not nefarious at all, but altruistically spent his time putting down amateur wizards who were exposing the craft for the few true magic masters. If the Virgin Mary showing up on a grilled cheese sandwich can be covered on CNN, you can imagine what would happen to somebody who can raise the dead, play chess with them, and have them fall back over at the first check. Magicians need privacy to get their work done. What work? Keeping miracles to a minimum and making the planet seem normal. How good of a job do they do? Well, you saw the Virgin Mary grilled cheese, but did you see the Last Supper wheel of Brie? No, and that's all thanks to Mr. Houdini.

Bathroom Monologue: How John Screws Himself Over From Ever Getting Published in * NAME OF MAGAZINE WITHHELD BY REQUEST *

First we tear off the extraneous folds of the unraveling cover, because it’s fucking annoying to have it drape down to the floor every time I accidentally open this thing. Next we scorn the airbrushed anorexic actresses and models that lie across the page in fashion that should cost $39.95, but probably runs nearer to the operating budget of a small island nation. During the unfortunate task of actually opening this mammoth stack of advertisements we skip the first ten or twenty pages, knowing they’ll all be trying to sell us something rather than point us to an article, and sadly shake our heads when we realize “ten or twenty” wasn’t hyperbole, but underestimation. When we can’t find the index, we’ll just flip through and hope to spy a couple of white pages with columns of words. Skimming the pages is perilous for while it will allow you to avoid being affected by most of the vapid, over-art-designed bullshit that makes up the majority of this “magazine,” you may miss one of the rare pages that actually features the work of a writer, or even less often, the work of a journalist or author. Look here – an eight-page article on the next Star Wars videogame, which will apparently open up a new universe in “gaming.” A couple of pages in and this eight-page article is broken up by another ad featuring some repugnantly “beautiful” woman in mood lighting that we can’t stand to look at long enough to find out what fragrance she’s hocking. We wonder if even television, that wasteland of integrity, would break up a news story or a skit on Saturday Night Live to bring you a word from their sponsors. We wonder if this is a news magazine or an overindulgent catalog. Then, nearing the end of our primary function here in the bathroom, we wonder if glossy paper wipes well.

Bathroom Monologue: Here’s to that color under my toenails

Pink was sick of his reputation as a girly color. He was badass, darn it. He was there at every open wound and surgery, but red blood got all of the credit, while he, the color of scar tissue and organs, the color of the tissue that held blood in and told it what to do, got no press. He was the color of infections, and yet through a homophone with “gangrene,” Green stole Pink’s limelight.

Well Pink wasn’t going to take this much longer. He was the color of several erogenous zones, and if people didn’t start giving his manliness more credit soon, he’d go X-rated next spring.

Bathroom Monologue: Simple Question, Simple Brain

How might an omnipotent, omniscient entity with no true physical form simple enough for the human eye to observe appear if It wanted to be seen by people It deemed worthwhile?

-Galactus
-A cloud
-The planet earth
-The planet Jupiter (perhaps speaking out of the Great Red Spot)
-A burning bush
-A woman wearing the sun as a robe
-The father he never knew
-The mother he always wanted
-The rich aunt that always picked up the check
-Friedrich Nietzsche (only on April 1st)
-The opening above a maze
-A very small part of a very comforting but incomprehensible whole, which would give you a massive heart attack if you seriously thought about for so much as an instant
-Her entire life experience, second-for-second, year-for-year, boredom-by-thrill, worry-by-joy, birth-by-death
-A tractor-trailer (Guaranteed Overnight Delivery truck?)

A Farewell to the Tree that was on Our Property but Fell on Theirs, and a Further Farewell to the Insurance Company That Wouldn't Cover It

I'll miss you most of all, stump. You never hurt nobody. When the rest of the tree was all, "Let's fall on their roof!" You was all, "I think I'll stay in the ground and mind my own business." Would have kept you around but the workmen said it was nothing extra to have you hauled away with the trunk. That's fuzzy logic, having an innocent bystander carted off with the criminals just because it's free, but honestly looking at you brought back a lot of bad memories. Actually, just one - the time I had to pay five hundred bucks because my tree fell on somebody else's fucking house.

Bathroom Monologue: Hot House Honey

[GRUFF STOVER sits on one side of the booth in camo gear with a sniper rifle over one shoulder; DARKLOSS SOULRIPPER VON ALUCARDIA sits across from GRUFF in Renaissance-era clothing and a massive, puffy cape; GARY sits next to DARKLOSS, almost falling out of the booth thanks to the cape. GRUFF is making a point and waving his fork.]

Gruff: She's a hot house flower. Won't last in the real world.
Gary: What the Hell is that?
Darkloss: The analogy of the hot house flower is something or someone who can't survive outside a special environment. The flower can't thrive in the wild. It will wilt. It's not really strong in humanless nature. Same goes for certain people, especially the innocent and naïve. They either change or die in the real world. There's no defense for them. They have to change.
Gary: We build a Hell of a lot of hot houses, don't we?
Gruff: Yeah, but--
Gary: If we do it for flowers we like, shouldn't we shell out for decent people?
Gruff: It's not a matter of money.
Darkloss: Then what?
Gary: Just be nice to them? That seems easier than building green houses. And I like nice people better than flowers. In fact, they're kind of the people I buy flowers for.
Darkloss: Them, and the really naughty people.
Gary: Can we grow those in greenhouses, too?

Bathroom Monologue: The P.P.G.

The Pantheon Poker Group meets every third Thursday. They wanted to do it on Wednesdays, but Odin claimed some sort of holiday, and he gets his way since he provides the hall. Sometimes they put off poker altogether and get drunk on the rainbow bridge, but mostly they play. Apollo is in because he's the god of poker (according to him, anyway). Obatala always sits in to complain – a would-be creator god never gets over those cosmic blue balls.

Complaining is as much a part of the deal as the dealer, because poker is a crutch for the Pantheon Poker Group. It's a means to converse without their respective worshipers going to war. In the case of poker only little chips need to be sacrificed, and if those mattered at all the game would be canceled on account of Raven’s perpetual cheating. Yet Odin is fond of Raven – he likes that type of bird and that type of deity, even if Raven refuses to fly himself and demanded first class airfare to the game. Apollo always springs for the airfare since he was the first to claim being god of cheaptickets.com. Apollo's newest divine franchises make up most of his chatter.

Odin likes to talk about what’s on TV, or how there should be more positive one-eyed characters in modern media. It’s humble, fraternal chat laced with the vernacular swears of three continents, becoming more voluminous as the night goes, on and Apollo and Odin argue whether the Norselands were on a separate continent from Europe. The drunker you are, the more confusing continental shelves become. When the discussion gets violent, Raven calls a random Celt for an unbiased opinion. The resulting opinion is always disqualified on value of it coming from yet another European aisle. Raven calls anyway. Two lords of the sky arguing technicalities always cracks the group up. Then Obatala opines how he would have made the islands part of the continent if only he’d gotten the job of creating the world. And while Odin and Apollo try to shut him up and console his highly intelligent design of the human body, Raven comes up with a royal straight flush.

Why, it must have been a miracle.

They’d pluck and cook him if it mattered, but the game is about the chatter, and the company.

Bathroom Monologue: Hole in One

He is The Pro, the most annoying fencer alive. Even apostates pray they don’t get killed by this pretentious asshole; even in death, they’d never live it down. He has fencing gloves, a customized mask, and always wears the newest athletic shoes. He carries a golf bag full of swords, each fitted to his grip, cast in titanium, optimized for the proper swing: a fencing foil, a rapier, a cutlass, a scimitar, a katana, and his “driver,” a claymore. I say, “he carries” quite loosely because, really, it’s his caddy that carries it. He employs an orphan as his caddy, since they don’t complain. If they get mouthy, he ditches them and buys a new one. The Pro jokes he should start buying them in bulk.

Bathroom Monologue: Seven Crystal Stars

Okay, if I had to scatter seven sacred relics to prevent some mastermind from collecting them and ruling the world, I wouldn’t stash them in seven really obvious huge dungeons. Firstly, those don’t exist. Secondly, it makes them very easy for him to find. After about the third dungeon this supervillain is bound to realize where the other four are.

1) The first one goes down the Mariana Trench. It’s the deepest hole in the known world, under so many atmospheres of water that it would kill anyone who tried to reach it. In fact, we’ve barely explored the place with robotics. A tiny crystal star would be darn near impossible to find in that abyss.
2) Drop one of them into the cement foundation of a Parliament building, preferably deep into it. You would thus have to demolish a government building and clear all the rubble just to look for it, and even then you probably wouldn’t have destroyed the foundations holding it. We also get free security, as a Parliament building should have a lot of that lying around.
3) To be a total dick, I’ll stow one of them on the next space probe headed for the outer reaches of the universe. It’s cheap, but considering this explorer pod is headed further out into space than we’ll probably ever send humans, it will be really hard to retrieve.
4) In the middle of the arctic storm zones, where despite global warming there is a constant subzero blizzard with zero visibility. Preferably we’ll drill a hundred-foot hole in the ice and drop it down there, then cover it up. Within minutes you’ll have no idea where we drilled the hole in all the hundreds of miles of tempestuous storm.
5) In classic Lord of the Rings fashion, we’ll drop one into the mouth of an active volcano. True, the indestructible relic won’t combust like Sauron’s jewelry, but hopefully it will sink a miles under the surface of the earth, cradled in boiling lava. Most volcanoes don’t erupt like a geyser, but spit up and drool down the slopes. However this hot lava will be lighter and flow easier than the relic, so it will be more likely to sink while the lava rises. If the sucker ever erupts so badly that the relic is coughed up, it will be hidden in the cooling magma, and even we won’t know where it is.
6) Drop the sixth into the deepest stretch of the wide Yangtze in China, a river so horribly polluted that humans won’t enter it, and all the wildlife has either died out or mutated. We’ll weight this relic down in a tungsten container that will be too thick to fully corrode, and dig into the riverbed. Maybe we’ll even attached a self-propelling drill to the bottom so that it can dig a huge hole behind it. With a few days of current you won’t be able to see where it went down. That is, if you could see in the Yangtze.
7) One I’m just going to bury somewhere. It will be a chaotically chosen spot of no importance. Not a national park or a wonder of the world. I’m just going to bury out in the middle of nowhere.

In the mean time, let’s go build some huge dungeons as decoys. Perhaps one can have an exact replica of one of the relics to fool the bastard.

Bathroom Monologue: Came for the Sand

Our family vacationed in Egypt this year. The kids were excited for the Sphinx and the Nile up until they realized “bazaar” is foreign for “elaborate gift shop,” at which point it was a pain to get them to go anywhere but the souvenir stands.

Such is the way of children, but Uncle Frank was even worse. Some men stare into the eyes of the Sphinx, but he glared. He wouldn’t climb the pyramids with us, even after I explained how much this spiritual privilege was costing. He wouldn’t even look at them. Just sulked and trudged around the outskirts, mostly in the shade.

“Did you really fly all this way to look away from one of the wonders of the world?” I asked.

He spat, “It’s not a wonder of the world. It’s a testament to slavery. I didn’t come to see what thousands of servants died to build. I came to see some of the sand they walked on, is all.”

I’m not sure who was angrier, the grandparents or the tour guide. Neither minded when the local water gave him violent diarrhea and forced him to miss a museum trip. He probably would have complained about the mummies on display.

We returned to the hotel to find him chugging electrolyte drinks and claiming that this visit had kindled a love of his heritage, which apparently ran through every oppressed North African people known to human history.

He’s the most militant minority I know. And Uncle Frank’s white.

Bathroom Monologue: Sixth Senses, OR, “We know prior to birth that we will have only five physical senses.” –Robert Schwartz, Courageous Souls

-Sense of sight
-Sense of touch
-Sense of hunger/fullness
-Sense of distances and sizes
-Sense of smell
-Sense of balance
-Sense of breathing/inhaling/exhaling
-Sense of taste
-Sense of sound/hearing
-Sense of internal pressures (bowels, bladder, etc.)
-Sense of fatigue/drowsiness
-Sense of cognition, what you're thinking and how to control your thoughts
-Sense of emotion
-Sense of time (enormously faulty)
-Sense of amounts/numbers

Know any other senses? Please illuminate me in the Comments section.

Bathroom Monologue: Time to Worship the Goat Skull

"I only ate two meals yesterday, walked three miles, and I gained three pounds? Oh, that’s it. Screw you, science. I’m not listening to you anymore. I’m listening to the goat skull. It lets me eat whatever I want, and it’s thin! It’s my friend. Wise and mighty goat skull, please tell your loyal servant how to get rid of these love handles.

…

Any time now."

Bathroom Monologue: Narration 2, OR, The Accidental Epilogue of the John's Tale

This one's a true story, no assuming ironic voices here - just assuming a Middle English voice. I took this class in Geoffrey Chaucer in college, partially because I thought we were going to find his corpse and huddle inside of it, and partially because he's one of the funniest writers to get admitted to the English canon. Comedy is sorely underrepresented in academia. We worked with a $100 hardcover that contained the original Middle English works of Chaucer, including every scrap of The Canterbury Tales that's excluded from lesser versions. There was no modern translation. We were forwarded to several scholarly websites to listen to clips and practice how the 'y' sounded when it followed an 'r' sound – this confederate consonant had at least four different vowel noises it could make given context. “He” sounded like “Hay,” and 'k' was only a silent letter when you thought it wasn't. You were expected to know how every vowel sounded naturally from the dialects of centuries ago, and to independently research the thousands of outdated words. Otherwise you wouldn't know what you'd just read for class.

This was particularly difficult for me, as I'd been calling him “Chow-sir” for the last decade. I'd even gotten his name wrong, and now we were reading aloud from his works every class, in proper pronunciation. To get even one syllable wrong meant the knowing gazes of your peers and public correction by the professor – a normally wonderful woman who hardened up on the spot, especially if you were still screwing up by Week 7. I was. I was mortified to learn we'd have to read a minimum of ten continuous lines aloud at the end of term, and that it would seriously effect our report.

I knew what I wanted to read, though. The accidental and untitled epilogue to The Pardoner's Tale, when he ended his didactic story and went straight into a sales pitch for fake relics and premium absolution. The “Hoste” got so pissed that he threatened to cut off the Pardoner's testicles and enshrine them in pig crap. Classic literature. The Knight (“Knyght,” or “kin-neecht”) had to step in and keep them from fighting. I loved it because it reminded me of photos of then-President Bill Clinton at Camp David with leaders of Palestine and Israel. He was taller and broader than both of them, and would put his arms around their shoulders, at once as though to make peace and to smilingly threaten to throttle the bastards if they weren't nice. A Jewish friend reproached me for besmirching the best time in Israeli-Palestinian relations. I put an arm around his shoulder.

In classic John Wiswell fashion, I decided to read the whole damned thing – some thirty or forty lines where ten were acceptable. Not that I could read one line properly. But I had to redeem myself – God holpen, to get a Pardon. I returned to the scholarly websites and listened to each vowel and special pronunciation over and over again, then began translating the page from Middle English to phonetic. It took to 1:00 AM, and then I got to practicing, ten lines at a go. I got up early every day that week, and made sure to go to bed late. For an hour I could do anything – play a videogame, watch anime, stare at the clouds, but every five minutes I would have to glance at the phonetic translation and read the first ten lines I saw aloud. By Wednesday I was glancing at the Middle English manuscript and doing the same. By Thursday I was going a little nuts, and started to put personality into the Pardoner, Hoost and Knyght. The Pardoner had showmanship, and the Hoost somehow became a stereotypical Italian. Doing a bad Italian accent in modern English is offensive, but especially at 7:30 AM, a bad Italian accent in a Middle English threat to cut off your testicles is hilarious. To this day I will screech, “shul be shryned in an hogges toord” for no apparent reason.

The brave Knyght sounded a little Russian, though his syllables were technically sound.

I remember three things from my recital. I remember the professor exclaiming, “Oh God!” when she realized I wasn't stopping at the end of the first stanza. I remember my Jewish friend laughing and asking how I'd fit Latin in there. And I remember receiving the only round of applause of anyone the entire semester. One out of three isn't bad. The Knyght was my favorite.

I still love Geoffrey Chaucer. He's undeniably one of the greats in our language, profane beyond belief back before profanity was overdone, and a deep thinker of nuanced characters who could make each of dozens of tales questionable and interpretable. I wrote a modernization of his Monk's Tale, wherein his Monk delivered awful Cliff's Notes versions of classic stories like the fall of Satan and the death of Achilles. Mine took a pick-axe to nearly a hundred pieces of classic literature, from Ovid's Metamorphoses to Kafka's Metamorphosis. The Canterbury Tales was included. It was all to express my deep admiration for Chaucer. I still get his name wrong, though.

Heere is ended The John's Tale.

Bathroom Monologue: TV Show Ideas

-John Wiswell's Celebrity Skiing
-John Wiswell's Celebrity Parachuting
-John Wiswell's Celebrity Shark Hunting
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Bathroom Monologue: “Is that the subject of Elizabeth Bishop?” –Jim Lehrer, News Hour

What is the subject matter of a woman? Or of a man? Might a woman’s subject be a man? Or a woman, if she were a lesbian? Or herself, if she were a narcissist? Or might she have more than one subject, if she were a real person like the rest of us, complex beyond words? Ms. Bishop wrote a mere ninety poems in her life, few for a popular poet in our time, yet to have all ninety be preoccupied with the same words or subject would be redundancy on a level beyond even Gertrude Stein’s tolerance. No, couldn’t a poet, shouldn’t a woman have as many subject matters as her mind and soul could absorb? Could not love and loss cohabitate in her synaptic pathways? In her meager (and mighty) ninety compositions, could not patriotism and prejudice, geology and epistemology, the universe and an acorn all be subject matters a mind might say to matter, to truly matter, beyond a trite explanation that they were all related to the same subject, to some holistic subject matter, like a human condition or an everything? Please don’t tell me a woman was interested in everything just for the sake of a little oversimplification of her mental lifetime. It would sell a woman short, and sell everything far shorter.

Bathroom Monologue: Narration

Getting me to read Chaucer aloud with proper Middle English pronunciation is like getting Godzilla to follow the traffic laws in Tokyo. He can’t even fit both feet on one side of the double yellow line.

Bathroom Monologue: All That’s Old…

In comparison to the New Age movement, the Old Age movement gets little attention. Everyone’s heard of the New Age infatuation with crystals, healing vibes and postmodern concepts of the divine. The New Agers even have sections in bookstores. The Old Agers? It’s a cruel joke that they share shelf space with the Mythology section. Patrons of the Old Age movement have shaggy hair and crazy beards similar to New Agers, but they wear togas with their Birkenstocks, and that funky smell on them isn’t B.O. It’s slaughtered goats.

These backwards-compatible spiritualists are significantly forward-thinking. They point out that Hera was a pioneer of women’s rights long before Susan B. Anthony or Saint Joan. Regardless, the National Organization of Women has voiced concern over some of the rights they espouse for women (including the primary right “to walk in on their husbands mid-adultery,” also called “The Medea Clause”).

Other organizations are synergizing with the movement. McDonalds intends to market on-site vomitoriums, similar to how they introduced in-door playgrounds. While the Independent Film Channel has denied Old Agers' request to play Jason and the Argonauts during Documentary Month, they say they will invest in more ancient Greek-oriented programming. Old Agers also own significant stock in several “green” energy companies, and are fast at work on channeling the north wind to reduce our need for oil. The Old Agers are very sensitive to our conflicts with the Middle East thanks to something about “the Peloponnesian War.”

Bathroom Monologue: Quite Human

Their grandmother makes the best snack, a combination of Cheez-Its, herbs and some type of oil. All her grandkids love it every time they visit. Every couple of years one will ask for the recipe, yet they never make them when they go home. Like seasonal dishes, part of the attraction is their rarity (and like seasonal dishes, part of the attraction is someone else doing the work). Her grandkids will miss them when she passes. Her grandkids will miss a lot, and miss these, but won’t realize they miss these and all the moments this snack is connected to until a week after the funeral, when her oldest granddaughter breaks down crying in the supermarket cracker aisle.

Bathroom Monologue: Political Hat Trick #3

1. Survey the general desires of the nation. Doesn’t matter if they are rational, realistic, or if you share them.
2. Promise something huge relating to these desires, which you probably can’t accomplish and have no serious intent of pursuing (end a war, reverse damage to the environment).
3. Attack the most a) unpopular and/or b) famous incumbent politicians who in any way disagree with the aim of your promise. If they are not earnestly opposed to it, portray them as such. If possible, vilify them entirely.
4. Balance a perception of being “outside” the system with the perception of being effective within it.
5. Dodge queries on any other political issues, or tie them into your central promise and/or the general vilification of your rivals.
6. Ride the promise to victory and public office.
7. Have ad firms and public relations jockeys divert attention from the matter with which your promise was concerned. At this stage you may have to make a small concession to the perception of the promise (give a little money to that cause, bring a couple of “our boys” home – be sure to be photographed with them if you do).
8. As years pass without good coming of the promise, hire pundits to blame he voters for being dumb enough to vote for something so unrealistic or implausible. Simultaneously sift into the background of politics, only surfacing to be seen near to (or thought of as related to) something generally positive within politics, whether or not you worked on it. It doesn't even have to be related to your branch of government.
9. In case someone might catch up to you as a new anti-incumbent, tout your a) record and/or b) experience from time in office. Vilify their a) lack of a record or b) record. If all else fails, find or create a new issue to make a promise about (immigration, globalization, robot invasion).

Bathroom Monologue: Bathroom Monologue to a Present

“This is what’s best for you. I realize that you are a teddy bear and cannot think, but I can’t help anthropomorphizing you. I am a human with a little human brain, and all it does is looks at things, remembers things and makes little models of itself in everything it sees and remembers. Fortunately if you are a little me then you should like your new owner, my aunt. She loves stuffed animals. Has bushels of them. You’ll have plenty of company. Of course, I wouldn’t want to be owned by her… She’s nice, but slavery? That’s a bit much. And Lord knows what your little button eyes will see over the years if she keeps you in her bedroom. Alternatively, you could spend eternity in a box in her attic. How can I do this to you? I’m a monster… Oops. Now you’ve accidentally been bumped against the toilet. Unsanitary. It would be disgusting to give you to her now. I’ll her a card instead. One with a bear on it.”